Because you may not have had enough: Harvey, Minghella and Edelstein, again

By Steven Zeitchik

So did David Edelstein cross a line in his assessment that Anthony Minghella was pushed too far by Harvey to a place called Oscar?

In a blog item last week, New York magazine critic Edelstein insinuated that Anthony Minghella should have made more adventurous personal films, noting a "disheartening falloff" from his debut feature "Truly, Madly Deeply" and going on to say that "what happened has something to do with someone whose name rhymes with Shmarvey Shmeinstein."

As linked to by Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, Edelstein this week retracts -- he says he was "over the line in so many ways" -- not for the aesthetic argument but for his theorizing about its reasons. "I stand by that opinion of those films but was wrong to finger Weinstein for pulling Minghella’s strings."

The New York critic is, perhaps only after A.O. Scott, the most insightful and measured print reviewer currently writing for a Gotham pub, with none of the colorful but self-conscious showiness of Manohla Dargis or the fluid but sometimes distractingly jokey prose of Anthony Lane. Instead, he's thoughtful and thought-provoking, a stylist with substance to spare. Even Edelstein's casual summaries pulse with lyricism and insight. "Minghella was a humanist with a penchant for characters who suffer mightily, and it wasn’t always clear what attracted him to Patricia Highsmith’s cold, cynical novel about a psychotically upwardly mobile chameleon," is his take here on "The Talented Mr. Ripley". (He's also a former Slate writer, and thus a scribe trained, in the best way, to look for contrarian angles, which may more than anything else explain his attempt at unorthodoxy here.)

But as he'd be the first to say, Edelstein wandered off the ranch when he began offering his post-production hypotheses. His idea about the reasons for "Cold Mountain" slackness -- "The film turns patchy and rhythmless, suggesting shmomeone had taken 40 whacks in the editing room" --are at best based only on Harvey's reputation and more likely just fanciful speculation.

Edlestein's retraction -- with words like "apologize" and "eat sh*t" -- is refreshing and noble (though by noting a post-blog Harvey call to him Edelstein doesn't exactly dispel his core claim of meddling).

But the irony of the retraction is that Edelstein seems to be apologizing for the less provocative of his two claims. Many directors who enjoy a good relationship with the Weinsteins have noted their hands-on involvement with their films; heck, the brothers themselves don't shy away from the charge. Friends and supporters say that on the whole it's given Miramax/TWC films a certain consistency of vision, and may in fact be one of the reasons for the brothers' longevity.

The second point, on the other hand, is more eyebrow-raising -- it's a criticism of a recently-deceased (and widely lionized) artist that essentially argues that, in quality and quantity, he didn't live up to his potential. "Why did he complete only six films (counting one in the can) in the eighteen years between 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' and his death? Where were the gutsy little modestly budgeted movies — good or bad or uneven — that could have kept him rooted?" Edelstein asks.

Part of the reason Edelstein seemed to point the finger at Harvey in the first place is to blunt just this criticism of Minghella; it's a lot less provocative to knock a late artist's work if you say he was the victim of a nettlesome studio exec. Take away the Harvey factor and you're pretty much left with a director who for reasons having to do with (laziness? personal limitations? misguidedness?  Edelstein doesn't say) produced work that came in below expectations. Whether you agree with it or not, it certainly seems like the more subversive claim.